30 Years of Star Wars

I first saw Star Wars: A New Hope, when I was eight years old, and it forever changed the way I look at the world.

It has been 30 years since the film premiered and made a profound impact on popular culture. Ever since, everyone from scientists to critics to comedians has attempted to explain its phenomenal success. Ultimately, Star Wars gains its popularity from its realistic assertion that there is often little to base our lives upon that is unchanging. A similar theme exists within many films concerning faith. Yet, unlike The Passion of the Christ, a highly successful film which chronicles a few salient points of the Christian faith, Star Wars is about the human religion.

What is this nebulous human faith? I would say the title of the 1977 epic is quite clear on this point. The human faith is hope. Continued below...

The deepest sorrows of eternal night. That hope is fundamental to the human condition speaks volumes as to who we are. Star Wars itself possesses human foibles, and is a work about human belief, set so purposefully and symbolically in a world where humans are not the only species.

We have been called "walking shadows," by Shakespeare, "gamblers with others' lives" by H.G. Wells. Emerson called man "A god in ruins." Yet, out of all the myriad and infinite words that have been pinned to the ephemeral nature of our impermanent constructs, hope cannot be removed. Hope that we can become what we may never be, hope that we might see a truth that doesn't exist, hope that we might rise to the sun one day and know exactly who we once were, that we might see the grand vista of our own lives and how they weave inextricably with those of the people around us.

The 30-year celebration poster of Star Wars—the famous "binary sunset" encapsulates what I believe to be the most iconic scene in all of cinema, and the graphic answer to the question of the saga's power.

Looking out at a horizon has a powerfully human element to it that I will never forget. When Luke Skywalker first looked off into the sky, he was filled with a hope fueled by the possibility that perhaps there was some great destiny out there which he could not even envision. Indeed, the story goes that he would find his family, help save a galaxy, rescue his father from eternal damnation, and, along the way, learn to believe.

This cinematic representation of hope as a faith is as strong as any that the canon, religious wars, and prayer could ever foster. Is there a greater faith than believing our destiny lies somewhere amongst the stars? The human religions I know, and the science I know, both point upward—those heavens, they are from whence we came.

But a small rebellion would only fight an empire if it believed in something. Outnumbered and outgunned, a new hope is the subject of the film, the power of a new belief. There is a question posed by that sunset, that ephemeral wonder which alights upon the briefest and most unconscious of thoughts: what is out there beyond that sun, those stars? What's out there beyond that endless sea on whose winds we will never sail? The answer to those questions ultimately culminates in many leaps of faith. The symbolism of that faith, that hope—that is George Lucas' Star Wars.

Hope then, is our faith, and it is fitting that a complete story whose ultimate points revolve around the spectrum of universal human concerns—the fate of a galaxy, freedom from slavery, the eternal love of a parent—should enjoy such global and historical acclaim.

The film and its message are so omnipresent in our consciousness that, to some, it has become a religion unto themselves is not at all inconsistent.

Perhaps there are some in the world who ought to watch Star Wars: world leaders, visionaries, the old, the young, the pessimists—I cannot imagine a person of any walk of life who would not benefit from such a profound immersion in the belief and hope that is uniquely the human religion.